The Cisco Nexus 7000 Switches comprise a modular data center-class product line designed for highly scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks with a fabric architecture that scales beyond 15 terabits per second (Tbps). Designed to meet the requirements of the most mission- critical data centers, it delivers continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Switches is based on a proven operating system, with enhanced features to deliver real-time system upgrades with exceptional manageability and serviceability. Its innovative design is purpose built to support end-to-end data center connectivity, consolidating IP, storage, and interprocess communication (IPC) networks onto a single Ethernet fabric.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Supervisor Module is designed to deliver scalable control plane and management functions for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis. It is based on a dual core processor that scales the control plane by harnessing the flexibility and power of the dual cores. The supervisors control the Layer 2 and 3 services, redundancy capabilities, configuration management, status monitoring, power and environmental management, and more. It provides centralized arbitration to the system fabric for all line cards. The fully distributed forwarding architecture allows the supervisor to support transparent upgrades to higher forwarding capacity- capable I/O and fabric modules. The supervisor incorporates an innovative dedicated connectivity management processor (CMP) to support remote management and troubleshooting of the complete system. Two supervisors are required for a fully redundant system, with one supervisor module running as the active device and the other in hot standby mode, providing exceptional high-availability features in data center-class products.

Features and Benefits

Supervisor Module

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Supervisor Module delivers a comprehensive set of features to address the needs of the most demanding data center deployments.

The CMP provides a complete out-of-band management and monitoring capability independent from the primary operating system. The CMP enables ‘lights out’ remote monitoring and management of the supervisor module, all modules and the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series system without the need for separate terminal servers with the associated additional complexity and cost. The CMP delivers the remote control through its own dedicated processor, memory, and boot flash memory and a separate Ethernet management port. The CMP can reset all system components, including power supplies; it can also reset the host supervisor module to which it is attached, allowing a complete system restart.

Table 1 summarizes the features and benefits of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Supervisor Module.

Table 1.Features and Benefits

Feature

Benefit

Supervisor

High-performance dual-core Intel Xeon processor

The multithreaded operating system runs on a dedicated dual-core processor. The flexible dual-core design harnesses the maximum processing power for control plane processing with enhanced reliability.

High availability

Two supervisor modules operate in active and standby modes with stateful supervisor failover to enhance total system availability.

Resilient dedicated connectivity to each fabric and I/O module slot

Dual redundant Ethernet out-of-band channels to each module and fabric provide resilience for communication between the control and line card processors.

Centralized arbiter

Active-active control of the flow of traffic through the switch fabric helps ensure transparent switchover with no losses.

LEDs clearly identify the CMP status separate from that of the supervisor.

Note: Not all Cisco Nexus 7000 Supervisor Module features are enabled in the first software release. Refer to the release notes for up-to-date software version information to see what features are supported.

Supervisor redundancy

Two supervisor modules are required in a Cisco Nexus 7000 system for high availability with active standby redundancy, where one supervisor module is operationally active, and the standby device serves as a hot backup. Out-of-band access to both supervisors is available from either CMP.